I’m using Gentoo on one of my spare machines as a development box. Plus I’m trying to make a switch to linux in the near future. Only problem is after installing basically just gnome and beryl, I’ve already used 5-6 gigs of space! So, anyone have any ideas on how to lighten this box a bit?
You could just install Damn Small Linux if you want a small install. Most Linux distros come with tons of crap because well, it’s all free so why the hell not? But since most of the software for linux was written by separate people who didn’t always work closely together, even basic stuff can require crap-loads of libraries that all do something different. Each one may be efficient and small, but they add up and have many redundant features. So, if a small group of “huge nerds” were to take all the functionality of those massive libraries of libraries and put it all in one comprehensive library set, it would probably take up 1/100th of the disk space and simultaneously break every major linux program in existence.
So basically what I’m saying is that unless you’re really worried about efficient disk space, don’t worry about it. You could always opt not to install all the fun gnome games and themes. You probably won’t need a mail client for a dev machine, and uh, get rid of your compilers and all related libraries. That’d lean up your box a bit!
OK, here’s a fun problem. I just installed the new Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on my main desktop system. It seems to recognize my Sound Blaster Audigy card just fine, bit I can’t hear any audio even when I tell the system to use the audigy card as the main sound device. Nothing I do seems to help. Should I install the OSS sound system instead of the default ALSA?
OSS is deprecated so it shouldn’t have any extra drivers. Try running rexima or aumix (or something similar) in the console as root and make adjustments in there to see if that helps.
This thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=372455 states that you might want to mute the spidif output. Its for breezy but I don’t think alsa has changed at all since breezy.
Oh, stupid Feisty is trying to load the built-in Realtek audio driver modules even though I disabled it in the BIOS. I found the solution in the Ubuntu forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=379466&highlight=feisty+audigy+no+sound
See, eft is a better word, so you should have stuck with eft.
I managed to get my size down about 1.5 gigs from last time by using -doc. Who needs a gig of documents?! Most man pages are posted on the net anyway